Web series 'Bring It to the Table' explores beliefs and their origins

Julie Winokur of Montclair uses little more than a folding table to listen to people talk about their beliefs about topics such as abortion in her web series âBring It to the Table.âJohn O'Boyle/The Star-Ledger

Julie Winokur hears voices, dozens of voices at a time — from the left, the right and in between.

As she edits her new web series, “Bring It to the Table,” the Montclair filmmaker relives the past half-year — time she spent listening to strangers from across the country discuss their political beliefs.

Winokur toured the East Coast and beyond with minimal paraphernalia — just two cameras and a folding table — for a project that was as much as a call for a civil dialogue as it was a mission to examine her own prejudices.

“Bring It to the Table,” which premiered last week at bringit2thetable.org, partly stems from a dinner table conversation Winokur had with her 17-year-old son, Eli Kashi, who called his mom “the most intolerant person he’d ever met,” Winokur recalls.

Stung by her son’s criticism, Winokur launched her project and sat down for about 100 “table talk” testimonials, during which she interviewed people with divergent opinions — and attempted to disprove her son’s claim about her own narrow-mindedness.

“He said, ‘When people have a different point of view, you don’t even listen. You just assume they’re wrong,’ ” remembers Winokur, co-founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization Talking Eyes Media with her husband, photojournalist Ed Kashi.

“It really struck me because I think I’m not alone when I say that I’m always assuming that other people are causing the political divisiveness.”

A Kickstarter campaign for the web series netted more than $32,000 in donations. Then, Winokur and her crew of three set up their table in heavily trafficked, visually interesting spots — parks and barbershops, the Democratic and Republican national conventions, a Young Republicans of Middlesex meeting in New Brunswick, a sports bar across the street from a General Motors auto factory in Ohio (where she and the crew were kicked out).

The webisodes run no longer than seven minutes, and each either clusters talks with several participants on one topic or tells a story — such as one on the relationship between a pair of Baptist and Muslim neighbors. Winokur says she wants to redirect attention toward a “smarter, more robust moderate center,” and away from slogan-slinging and reactionary extremes.

She encourages people to channel personal experiences to find the root of their beliefs. She had long conversations with each participant, which she says are therapeutic in breaking down a hard-line stance.

“It’s hard to have an authentic conversation when you’re not talking about things from a place of true knowledge, and personal experience, especially if you’re just repeating rhetoric you’ve heard,” she says.

Some of the first 12 webisodes were featured on tv.msnbc.com during the run-up to the election.

In the series, participants sit at a flimsy REI camping table with a rollable top, identify themselves and move a small Crate & Barrel flower arrangement right or left to show where they are on the political spectrum.

Sometimes Winokur interjects with a factual correction about health care reform, an issue she considers her specialty.

But mostly, she listens.

Her goal wasn’t to get people to switch their party affiliations, Winokur says, or even change her own — but rather, to explore her guests’ views and see where they broke ranks with their party of choice.

“The rare person has opinions that don’t cross over,” she says, but most people she met held to their parties’ policies on only some issues.

For example, Winokur says the feeling among Log Cabin Republicans — a group for gay and lesbian Americans — is that it’s more valuable to change the party from within than to change parties. She asked several people who identified themselves as gay and Republican, “How can you possibly support a party that doesn’t support you?”

“I knew I was conservative long before I knew I was gay,” one woman responded. She went on to add: “You don’t get your marriage license from a church. You get it from City Hall. It is a civil institution, one granted by the state. It is unconscionable and unconstitutional to deny that same protection.”

Despite the cacophony of rhetoric overlapping in Winokur’s head like dialogue in a Robert Altman movie, the position of the flower on her table has not budged. She says the project strengthened her political identity as a left-leaning moderate.

On the home front, Winokur says there has been progress.

Her son Eli, who plays baseball as a 12th-grader at Montclair High School, was invited to attend Air Force Academy. Winokur’s political leanings spurred her initial reluctance over that idea, she says.

After “Bring It to the Table,” she warmed to the idea of him visiting the campus in Colorado — on his own.

“It made me have a more open mind about that as an option, and his choice, should he choose to do that,” she says.

“That to me is an indication of looking at things through a wider lens — which I wouldn’t have done before.”

A sample of the dialogue from the “Bring It To the Table” webisode “Abortion: Are you conflicted?” in which several participants in Julie Winokur’s series discuss their views on the topic, and how they came to hold them

“I grew up very pro-choice. And 25 years later, I’m still struggling with that issue.”
— John Underwood, a Republican software developer from North Carolina

“The Republicans talk about getting the government out of the doctor’s office, and then they say pro-life — which is getting back into the doctor’s office.”
— John Underwood

“I am adopted. For a very long time, I wanted nothing to do with abortion, at all, I would never say there’s a circumstance where it’s okay.”
— Benjamin Clark, a Democratic student at the University of Florida-Gainesville

“I think the issue has been settled on the federal level, and that they should be safe and rare.”
— Michael Carr, a gay Republican from Colorado with political ambitions

“When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a sonogram done and there was a heartbeat and there were brain waves, and I was like, 'Wow, I didn’t realize that at 5 weeks old — it’s still some cells but … she was a person.' "
— Charlotte Rapacciuolo, a Republican mother from Virginia

“The reality of the situation is that consciousness does not come until a lot later.”
— Benjamin Clark